I’m sure it’s come to your attention from time to time that I am interested in aesthetics. Although I am by no means professional grade in my graphic design skill, I enjoy creating new graphics for my website and exercising my artistic muscle. The down side to that is that graphic design trends keep changing, and the pages I last re-designed designed back in 2012 or 2013 are starting to look dated. According to what I’ve read, the hot new trends for this year are simplified graphics, bolder colors, and larger text sizes.

To that end, I’ve started working on refreshing he graphics for the secondary pages of my website, stripping out unnecessary gradients and lighting effects and imposing some rough color-coding on sections of the site. This is most evident so far in my Library, where my sections on Atlantis, Giants, and Mesopotamian Texts all have color-coded graphics.

It will take me a while to refresh the whole site, but if you run across a page that is particularly ugly, let me know and I’ll see if I can get it up to date.

Meanwhile, if you have been reading my blog regularly, you’ll remember that not too long ago the staff of Ancient Origins decamped to Ecuador and in that country teamed up with gigantologists to go in search of the supposed treasures of Father Crespi, treasures made famous by Erich von Däniken in The Gold of the Gods. These included alleged golden artifacts depicting Old World motifs and supposed antediluvian scenes “proving” that Middle Easterners colonized America before the Flood. As I discussed several times before, skeptics and scholars who viewed the Crespi collection in the 1970s unanimously agreed that the artifacts were modern forgeries, and only one piece was actually made of gold, itself apparently made from a looted ancient piece, smashed and impressed with a new (forged) design.

The Ancient Origins team denied this, even as they found where the forged artifacts are stored and discovered anew that they are little more than base metal made by modern artisans. Having come too close to the real truth, they recoiled and now have proposed a wide-ranging conspiracy theory to save the diffusionist “truth” they want to believe in.

In a new articleAncient Origins founder Ioannis Syrigos, writing in the third person as “John Black,” says that he wanted to get to the bottom of the issue of why the one or possible handful of gold artifacts in the Crespi collection were not among the piles of base metal junk collected by the Central Bank of Ecuador when it purchased Crespi’s anthropological collection and inherited his forgeries along with it. It only half-occurs to him that there is little mystery in why the only valuable metals in the collection would have disappeared while the junk remained untouched.

Instead, Syrigos visited the director of the university Crespi founded, Luis Álvarez Rodas, on March 30 to inquire after the golden artifacts. Syrigos claims that Álvarez Rodas became “uncomfortable” in discussing the artifacts, first claiming that they had been stolen at least two years before Crespi’s death, and later saying he was “not authorized” to speak of them. Something must have been lost in translation since both Álvarez Rodas and his assistant spoke about them to Syrigos, by his own admission, before this statement. I have sent an email to Dr. Álvarez Rodas to inquire into his side of the story, and I will let you know if he responds.

Syrigos tries to concoct a Vatican conspiracy. He says that he asked Álvarez Rodas whether artifacts from Crespi’s collection had been sent to the Vatican, and Álvarez Rodas tells him that yes, indeed, some of Crespi’s collection of art had been sent to Rome. This does not imply that the golden plates had been, or that the Vatican was attempting to cover up antediluvian Nephilim in Ecuador. Instead, it seems to refer to the common practice of priests sending examples of indigenous art back to the Vatican collections. Syrigos might have done well to contact the Vatican and ask what they received from Crespi. Syrigos also claims that a source told him that there was a rumor that Crespi’s church sold the golden artifacts to the Ecuadoran military, but he concedes that there is no proof and that he made no effort to confirm this.

Syrigos alleges that Álvarez Rodas and his staff subtly threatened him, warning him off of further investigation of the university and its mission to have the Vatican canonize Crespi:

It was quite clear that during our conversation many contradictory statements were made, revealing that there is very obviously something that someone does not want the public to know about. Is there a cover up to hide the fact that the precious artifacts were stolen or sold for profit by someone? Or where they hidden away because they revealed something controversial about the history of the country?

​According to the information Syrigos provided, all of the Crespi artifacts are accounted for, except for one or at most a couple of pieces made from gold, which were gone before the Central Bank of Ecuador purchased the collection. The artifacts are unlikely to have been “hidden away” since they were publicly displayed both by Crespi himself and by ancient astronaut theorists for several decades. Where Syrigos sees contradictions and conspiracies, a parsimonious reading of his own evidence strongly suggests that the golden piece(s) were stolen or sold off because they were the only pieces of gold. It’s probably not worth attributing to conspiracy what can more easily be explained by corruption or greed.

"anyone stupid enough to take this kind of hoax seriously deserves to be cheated" (Ian Ridpath, Messages from the Stars: Communication and Contact with Extraterrestrial Life, Harper & Row, 1979)

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Not the Comte de Saint Germain

4/12/2016 02:13:07 pm

Not to say you shouldn't do what you want with the redesign, but your remarks about design trends just kind of set me off. This is more a general rant than a comment on any specific changes you may make to this site.

The latest trends are rarely worth following. The trend in graphic design today is to simplify to the point of blandness. The old Verizon logo, for example, wasn't exactly a complicated design to begin with. The new version is just a word with a check mark next to it. And the hot fad in webpage design is to do all kinds of fancy tricks with scrolling, even though they're often intrusive and distracting. Unless there's some technical reason why an old design doesn't work in new formats, I see nothing wrong with sticking to designs from 2012. It was only four years ago, for goodness' sake!

And there's something to be said for consistent branding. It represents reliability and durability, things our culture doesn't seem to care much about. My favorite example of that? Tabasco sauce. I don't even like Tabasco sauce, but I like that a Tabasco bottle in a movie from the 1940s looks the same as a Tabasco bottle today.

(My support for tradition and reliability may seem weird considering the rather, um, anti-traditionalist political sentiments I've expressed here before. I just think it's really stupid that our society is obsessed with changing things that don't need changing but refuses to alter the things that do.)

I tend to go for "evolution" rather than "revolution" in changing and updating my designs. There's clear continuity from my original 2010 design, through the 2012 and 2014 redesigns. I'm not so much planning to destroy everything chasing trends as much as "refresh" the graphics by cutting out the gradients and shadows that I didn't care for very much at the time and don't like now. Another reason is that more people now access my site on mobile platforms than on laptops, so the smaller, more detailed graphics don't really show up.

I hate the stupid scrolling tricks, and I will never add those! Nothing pisses me off more than when I'm trying to read the content and pictures go flying around or the text slides off the screen.

If you look at the pages I pointed to in my post above, you'll get an idea of what I'm going for: It's demonstrably similar to what had been there before (some only changed color) but the text is a bit easier to read on smaller screens, and the designs are a little bolder and less busy. My goal is that if I didn't point it out, you probably wouldn't have noticed that anything had really changed all that much.

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Not the Comte de Saint Germain

4/12/2016 03:36:22 pm

That makes sense. Like I said, I wasn't so much commenting on your changes as on the silliness of design trends in general.

Uncle Ron

4/12/2016 02:30:59 pm

I got a little laugh out of "the pages I last . . . designed back in 2012 or 2013 are starting to look dated." Well, Duh! ALL you designs are base on ancient imagery! (But I know that's not what you meant.)

I think Not-the-CdSG makes some very good points though.

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Kathleen

4/12/2016 03:55:50 pm

>>>Syrigos alleges that Álvarez Rodas and his staff subtly threatened him, warning him off of further investigation of the university and its mission to have the Vatican canonize Crespi<<< If the university is campaigning to have Crespi canonized, they certainly wouldn't want anyone to once more expose and broadcast Crespi's involvement in perpetuating a hoax. Not very saintly of Crespi, self-serving but not conspiratorial of the university.

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colloquium

4/13/2016 11:35:44 am

Every Christian relic is a fake.

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Jung

4/13/2016 07:01:46 pm

Oh hai Time Machine.

Pope Francis

4/16/2016 02:31:24 pm

You have my blessings !!
I will pray for you, Jung

DaveR

4/12/2016 04:15:10 pm

Yet another vast international, nay, full on global, conspiracy to destroy evidence and hide the truth.

Fortunately we have these brave people who will risk everything...even their very lives...to expose these dastardly academics and their evil deeds!

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colloquium

4/12/2016 04:20:42 pm

Except it's only documentary makers that are giving them slack,
Real people in the real world don't even have to think that things like Flying Saucers don't exist.

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Clete

4/12/2016 05:40:31 pm

Not true, not true. Yesterday, I was washing my dishes. The saucer that I was washing slipped out of my hand while I was putting it away and flew several inches. It was a true flying saucer.

Kathleen

4/12/2016 06:15:05 pm

I think that the aliens helping to obscure the truth. That would make the conspiracy universal.

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colloquium

4/13/2016 04:06:47 am

Kathleen

Your New Testament is a conspiracy theory.
Ask any skeptic.

DaveR

4/13/2016 07:35:17 am

I forgot about the ETs. I'm sure they're using some kind of alien technology to cloud our minds. Truly a universal conspiracy.

John

4/17/2016 05:24:32 pm

Not necessarily universal, it could just be galactic.

Please consider us colorblind males and not go to deeply into color coding.

Only Me

4/12/2016 07:15:19 pm

I love this stuff, I really do.

"It's Father Crespi's collection!"
"It's...mostly useless junk."
"...Then the *real* artifacts must have been stolen, sold off or are hidden away as part of a conspiracy!"

I'm glad I don't have to pay for such comedy.

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Shane Sullivan

4/12/2016 07:24:09 pm

I believe they call that the "No True Trashman" fallacy.

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Only Me

4/12/2016 08:46:52 pm

Makes sense. They probably haven't heard about the word, either. :)

colloquium

4/13/2016 09:19:41 am

In the beginning was the Word

Bob Jase

4/13/2016 03:20:04 pm

If Crespi had actually had a building full of gold it would have been stolen a long time before he died.

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Kal

4/13/2016 05:25:16 pm

Maybe what little gold he actually had went into that university's coffers, or in donations that went to try and canonize him.

The leftovers are...extra Crespi!

Someone had to say it.

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Bob Jase

4/13/2016 06:51:46 pm

I prefer original relic-ry.

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About Me

I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.